The critical consensus

It is heartening to find a teen-oriented movie franchise as gritty as The Hunger Games. Even so, Catching Fire remains contradictory, caught in some nether world between nightmarish political allegory and adolescent escapism.

It’s a meaty set-up, and while the film takes its time exploring the characters, its themes and action sequences are more forcefully realised than they were first time round, suggesting that this series may soon be the one against which all other franchises will be judged.

Proving once again why Jennifer Lawrence deserves her Oscar, Catching Fire delivers on all the promise of Part 1 with a gutsier, tougher, better round of Games. The odds are forever in Mockingjay’s favour…

You can feel the franchise dynamic chugging beneath, with the result that Catching Fire is not quite a full course, more of an amuse bouche, making its mammoth audience hungry for future, meatier instalments.

What’s disappointing is that the film doesn’t so much end, as cut off at a cliffhanger. Professionally, I’d condemn this as terribly clumsy filmmaking – but really, I just want to see the Games continue.

It’s difficult to see evidence of the $140m budget in what is essentially a retread of the first film, with equally dull set-pieces and boring pseudo-characters orbiting Lawrence’s taciturn and tough Katniss.

Teenage girls, who will see this in droves, will be completely enraptured. Others might be amused and intrigued but secretly long instead for those cheap, fast, satirical movies about horrifically corporate-controlled futures and violent sports such as Rollerball, Battle Royale and Death Race 2000.

Whether shooting arrows or intervening to stop a friend from being horsewhipped, [Lawrence] plays Katniss with such ferocious conviction that we never question for a moment how far-fetched the premise here actually is.